9DAN

A bare-bones keysounded rhythm game with basically nothing but the one thing that matters: great music. It's not incredibly difficult (although the Inferno difficulty is coming soon in a free update) and playing via touchscreen feels a little bit laggy, but it's absolutely worth it for anyone who considers themselves a fan of this genre. The various themes are all nicely done (I especially like the intentionally bad "kuso" one), but some of them can kind of obscure the note field unfortunately. Never badly enough to be frustrating but the darker themes tend to be harder to read. Apparently a theme selector is coming soon though apparently so that should be remedied for anyone who dislikes certain ones. The music itself covers a huge breadth of genres, but a good chunk of it is East Asian Vocaloid stuff, whether metal or pop or EDM. There is a lot of Mandarin in this game, and several songs that lean heavy into the more traditional Chinese side of things even. For me this is a real treat because I love that sound, but if you're put off by stuff like that then this game might not be your style. Overall it still feels like a mobile port, but it's a port **** game at the right price. The fact that keys can be remapped is great and lets you use something like a fightstick if you want (way better than controller or touchscreen). Recommended highly to hardcore rhythm game fans, but for those who want something more than just raw charts to chew through this is not your spot. Casual players should wait for "Taiko no Tatsujin" later this month and they'll be happier since that has party games, multiplayer, unlockables and a little story-ish thing, as well as a dedicated drumcon.

Just wait for this one to go free on PS+ in less than 6 months lol. What a mess.

Great title with tons of replay value and lots of fun bosses that is pretty much essential if you enjoy hunting games. Gets zero stars though because Tecmo-Koei are insufferable tools that insist on disabling external music and Spotify in every one of their releases. Every single moment that Toukiden 2 is running is considered a "blocked scene" just to make sure that players cannot listen to their own music. It's beyond trash ordinarily, but the fact that this a game in a genre which requires hundreds of hours of heavy grinding makes it unforgivable. If they ever update their game and fix this crap I will update my score. Until then, I've got nothing but a huge middle finger for Tecmo-Koei and every other dev that tries to pull this stupid BS. I will never understand why Sony even allows it in the first place.

This game could've been so good. The concept seems great. It was described to me as a "card-based rogue-like dungeon crawler with action RPG combat and CYOA-style mechanics." Sounds right up my alley! Unfortunately, the awful balancing, terrible combat and total reliance on luck-based difficulty just make HoF2 alternatingly frustrating and boring. The combat itself is strictly Simon Says where you mash attack until a prompt appears, and then press the button the game tells you to. It's incredibly stale almost immediately and feels like a half-assed attempt at ripping off the Batman games. I thought that there would be some kind of exploration or something in these little battles but nope, you are in a circle and you fight enemies. That is literally it. After playing for a while, you begin to dread seeing combat cards more than any other, just because they halt the ACTUAL game completely for upwards of a minute at a time. Every enemy takes at least 5-6 hits to kill no matter what weapon you are using, some taking more like 9 or 10. And don't even get me started on bosses with armor that you have to bash against for 45 seconds or more just so you can actually start damaging them. It's a horrible slog from the very first fight and the more you play the worse it gets. The only time you will ever lose is because you get sick of it and just start mashing in frustration. So then since there is no actual difficulty in the combat, how does HoF2 challenge the player? Well, it doesn't. This game's idea of difficulty amounts to giving you 4 cards that fail you and 1 card that doesn't, and then making you pick at random. Or maybe giving you 3 dice and telling you to roll a 15. Or maybe just littering the map with an absurd number of trap cards, because the devs want to... punish exploration? Yeah, I don't get it either. There is zero strategy and the vast majority of the time that you lose, it will not be your fault. I grew up playing D&D and game books like Forest of Doom, so I'm no stranger to RNG-based systems, but HoF2 consistently feels unfair in a way that those other games never did. Being forced to grind the same mission 4-5 times in a row just so you can actually complete it and get your stupid gold token is the exact opposite of fun, and only serves to make the game grow staler even faster than it would without this crap. Basically, if you are playing for the tabletop aspect, I can't recommend this game. It's too grindy, unfair and repetitive to be fun, and the experience is constantly being interrupted by the subpar combat. But I can't recommend it to fans of action RPGs either. I honestly don't know who this game is supposed to be for, or why anyone would play it. It's probably the most disappointing game I played in 2017.

I wanted to like this game so bad. And I do like parts of this game, actually. I love its combat with humanoid enemies in the first couple of stages. But Deck 13 have no idea how to make other encounters difficult without terrible gimmicks. Was your favorite Souls boss Dragon God or Adjudicator? Cuz apparently those are the only ones that Deck 13 liked! The bosses and most non-humanoid creatures in general have horrible, annoying mechanics attached to them (usually invincibility-related) along with spammy, zero recovery movesets that ensure there is only ONE WAY to fight - dash in, dash out. It makes the long, flowing combos they have designed for each weapon completely useless. That ducking/jumping mechanic? Worthless. Different weapon types? Doesn't matter, they all play the same when you have such short windows to attack. This isn't even getting into their love of piling on 2-3 enemies at a time when the game gives the player ZERO tools to deal with groups. It's just terrible design. Deck 13 is the kid that your D&D group never lets be DM, so you give them a chance because you feel bad, only for them to turn around and make the game so miserable and unfair for everyone else playing that you never let them try again. And they obviously wanted to ape Bloodborne with the high damage and dashes, but completely missed the fact that Bloodborne gives you massive amounts of healing, ranged parries and I-FRAMES DURING DODGE to compensate for the disgustingly OP enemies. What were they thinking?! I just honestly don't believe they ever playtested The Surge. Beyond the fact that it becomes an unbearable, horrible slog after the second level, there are tons of bugs (including game-breaking ones), I have had multiple crashes on PS4, and PC users have discovered that wonky debug quicksave and reload were still mapped to Fn keys in the shipped game! DECK 13, GET IT TOGETHER!! TL;DR - I wish The Surge's combat was in a better game - or at least one that actually respected the player. Until it is patched to alleviate the difficulty somehow, just stay away. I regret buying it and you probably will, too. It will likely end up free on PS+ in a year or so anyways like many Focus Home titles.

This game is a perfect example of a hard 5. The artstyle is great, and the humor is very hit-or-miss. Those would the strong-ish points of the game. The gameplay itself is... boring? I don't know, it's not bad or offensive. It's not really fun, though. You have to stop firing to switch weapons and your specials are actually a separate weapon entirely, which means that to use your special in the middle of a fight you have to do this: 1. Stop firing 2. Switch to the special you want to use by tapping O (twice if you want to use the SECOND special) 3. Use the special 4. Tap triangle to switch back to your first weapon so you can fire again It's just clunky. The shark character is a perfect example of these poorly thought out control schemes and mechanics. One of her specials is a grappling hook to traverse quickly. Cool, great! Except, again, to use it, you have to stop firing. And then you have to HOLD the grappling hook button for a second, not just tap it because she actually has a SECOND mechanic tied to L1 which is a worthless mid-air shield-flip. This means that you can't actually use your grappling hook to get out of danger reliably. Not to mention the fact that it's buggy as hell and you often end up attaching to something you weren't even aiming for. The entire game is full of crap like this. Kudos to the artists, but this game kinda ****. This isn't even getting into the fact that it's a total F2P grind just to unlock weapons. Very glad it was free to try and would not recommend purchasing this game at all once it leave PS+.

Simple disclaimer here. With the game's current balancing, I think anyone who is interested in FH for its "deep combat" should be warned that the high-level gameplay is reduced to something that is even less than rock, paper, scissors. Everything can be reacted to, which makes perfect defense entirely possible and ruins the experience for me and many other players. Perfect defense should never be humanly possible in a fighting game and until they fix this issue, there will be no true mind-games or anything like them in FH. Most characters will remain useless without any sort of actual 50/50, new maps will add nothing and the playerbase will dwindle rapidly as they get bored of facing off against reactive players. This has happened to many games before and it could easily happen to FH. But if they fixed the perfect defense issue, I would still probably only give the game a 4, because there is not even the bare minimum of what would be needed for a competitive PvP game and the single player "content" (aka extended tutorial) is trash. Nice and scummy microtransactions, as well. Very generous of Ubi to sneak those into their game by saying "it's just cosmetic" when player customization is literally the only progression content available. Highly disappointing game. I would say avoid at all costs unless it's on sale for like $20 and you have a group of friends who all want to play a party melee brawl type of game together for a weekend. Asking for anything beyond that from this game is far too much.

Pros: - Very generous F2P model, NOT P2W AT ALL - Great music and sound design from Silent Hill's Akira Yamaoka, who also licensed over 100 different tracks from JP bands just for this game - Highly addictive gameplay loop - Good level randomization - Gross/hilarious cyber-guro-Tony Hawk's Pro Skater aesthetic - Engaging asynchronous multiplayer Cons: - Souls-style combat feels good 1v1 but the game loves to send big crowds with infinite aggro range at you which is HORRIBLE and needlessly frustrating - Camera and lock-on system are pretty much trash - Enemy variety seems kind of low Mixed (I like it but you might not): - Extreme old school grind and difficulty It's Free: - It's FREE lmao why are you reading this just DL it

For $30 this is a decent little ARPG. Awesome art style, great sense of humor, deep customization, plenty of freedom in determining your own difficulty/pacing and a smart combat system that uses long combos, extreme mobility, parries, near-infinite juggling, "sword clash" attack-while-blocking mechanics and more. Great hitboxes and solid controls help give the whole thing a very polished feel. The game has definite problems as well, though, mostly of the typical "budget" variety. There is a limited number of animations, environments and enemies with re-skins everywhere. Most of them are clever or unique enough for me to give it a pass, especially considering how much I like the bosses, but it's still repetitive. Soundtrack is alright (sound design is better), but I would bring my own music for the long grind sessions since it is mostly silent anyways. Overall, pretty good imo. If you like Odin's Sphere or Dragon's Crown and are looking for something to scratch that itch, this is worth checking out. Makes me hopeful for more from this dev in the future.

If you have ever played Minecraft and felt like the game could use some sort of "adventure mode", with real NPCs and questlines and events and all of that, here you go. That is pretty much DQB, except it also brings from DG the great music, funny writing, beautiful character designs, etc. Not as mechanically deep as some other crafting types, but much more structured (in a fun way). Hard not to recommend it to people who like chill games.

game is great, but really really hard and disorienting. instead of focusing on making a rhythm game with difficult execution, the devs did everything possible to confuse and distract the player from being able to read the rather simple patterns, and to great effect. the note lane bends, contorts, flips, spirals, multiplies and dissolves while the pace rapidly climbs through the course until you encounter a boss. at that point, not only does the lane absolutely lose it as the central vanishing point is obliterated, but you are trapped in an infinite "do or die" 16-bar(ish) loop that requires building combos to power up shots you use to deal damage and clear the lane for the next pattern. do this several times, and you get dropped into the next section, and then fight a final boss after that. all in all, a single level can take somewhere around 20 minutes to over an hour (for me at least) depending on how much you fail. checkpoints are very generous, so you are rarely forced to replay much more than 20-30 seconds of a stage per failure. there are 9 levels so it is a good deal for the $20 imo especially since the replay value is high. not something i would play for an extended amount of time though, that's for sure. this one needs breaks.